The Madman said:
An experience doesn't need to be something 'new' or 'innovative' in order to be enjoyable, in fact the case is quite often the opposite with the warm familiarity being what people are seeking.
No, it doesn't, but neither do I credit games with capturing "warm familiarity" because they aped the graphics style of a bygone era.
I'm going to preface this by saying that there is NOTHING WRONG with liking these games. I'm not saying anyone is stupid for liking them, or that they can't be favorites. I am saying that it's very hard to issue any kind of praise for them that isn't followed by a forest of asterisks, and I find it to be some combination of depressing and hilarious that we pillory more modern offerings for certain shortcomings that we're willing to hand wave in these games. Presumably because of "warm familiarity". Hell even the term "warm familiarity" is such a cop out. Call of Duty 18, Call of Dutiest isn't a RETREAD guys. Assassins Creed 11, the Assassinest Creed isn't FORMULAIC. They're simply capitalizing on
warm familiarity. But I digress. Let's talk specifics again.
Pillars of Eternity
Visually it's got crisp, beautiful backgrounds vibrant with colour and full of neat lighting tricks and moving parts to help it feel alive, reminiscent of ye olden pc rpg except in bright new HD visuals.
See, I just find this to be risible. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, naturally, but we should be applying labels like that rather sparingly to games or we have nowhere else to go. I recall some reviews talking about indie games and their "gorgeous pixel graphics", and all I can think is really? Pixel graphics are "gorgeous" now, are they? And there was nothing remarkable about these games and their art aside from the fact it was pixels. Pixels = gorgeous.
But hey, it's not all about bump mapping and polygon count, right? What about art direction?
Why is Pillars of Eternity "beautiful"? Can you tell me anything about it's visual style or design that stands out as unique, or compelling, or riveting? Something that speaks of a powerful artistic vision, or a commitment to mise-en-scene, or really anything other than "They rendered a bunch of trees and buildings, statically"?
Pillars of Eternity has FUNCTIONAL graphics. They are most comparable to games that are now older than some of the people posting on this site. This is not any kind of particular accomplishment. Certainly you can applaud them for evoking a particular time in the industry, but is that a high watermark of achievement? I consider Ultima to be the most important series of CRPGs ever made, by a country mile, but if someone rebooted it today and captured the look and feel of Ultima IV, I would consider it a RESOUNDING FAILURE.
Chanters and Cipher are interesting takes on seemingly familiar class ideas while other more standard classes like the paladin have little gimmicks to keep them fresh.
There is absolutely nothing fresh about it. Chanters are bards by any other name, and Ciphers are Mages. They don't even merit interesting or unique mechanics, they just...do DPS. Oh boy! Obsidian, anointed due to their time as Black Isle as some of the best writers in the industry, who name-checked the wild and wonderful Planescape Torment when kickstarting this game, give us a game of wizards and warriors that is deeply rooted in...what did you call it?..."tried and true D&D tradition". Zero imagination. Virtually a copy-paste of Baldur's Gate with some textures swapped around and names shifted. Again, if "warm familiarity" is your only goal, have at it, but why are we commending this? When Far Cry 4 launched and was essentially a palette swap for Far Cry 3 right down to the outlandish villain, did we cheer and say "Huzzah for Ubisoft, warm familiarity wins again"? When the 18,000th WoW clone launches, should MMO fans rejoice, and pronounce another victory for warm familiarity?
The game offers a plethora of dialogue options to determine your past and present, that help decide how your character feels about things and to which the game will then often react to, making your protagonist feel like an actual character in this setting rather than just another paper-thin proxy for the player ala most other rpg
I'm sorry but this is nonsense. There is nothing particularly robust about the character creation or the rooting of said character in the setting. I barely remember my character outside their class, and I certainly wasn't captured by the writing. Even the fact that you're yet another goddam chosen one would have been greeted with high ridicule coming from a more established developer. Yet I could talk to you for hours about my characters in Baldur's Gate or Planescape, or even modern offerings like Mass Effect or even fackin' Skyrim, where 90% of it was authorial insert. I'm glad the game stimulated your imagination, but it wasn't anything the GAME was doing.
Wasteland 2 meanwhile you seem to argue doesn't need to exist because the Fallout franchise still exists, but that's a rubbish argument in that the new Fallout games bear so little resemblance to their older kin it might as well be a new franchise entirely.
Yes, correct, the series evolved, which is why Wasteland 2 copies an EVOLUTION and not the original game, or it would have looked like this:
I actually played the original Wasteland when it was new, and the 'sequel' bears very little resemblance to it (aside from lifting the killer bunnies and ag center business lock stock and barrel), choosing instead to ape many of the game play conventions of a spiritual successor that was released over a decade later. Funny how that works, it's almost like the medium matures and game play evolves. "In every way that matters", Wasteland 2 is ALSO a new franchise entirely.
Are it's mechanics a bit wonky? Certainly, although I do think you're overstating things with your all-caps cries of how incompetent the developers are.
A bit? Please. PLEASE.
You've got stats that do not affect skills at all, so your 10 STR brute will be worse at breaking a board than your 1 STR weakling if the 1 STR weakling put a point into bashing. The only stats that matter affect AP, CI, or skill points, making half of them utterly worthless dump stats, leading to universally recommended stat allotments featuring half the stats set to 1. Skills are utterly binary...you either have the skill you need or don't...and there's more than ample skill points to cover every essential skill. If you need to use a skill, you click the thing, and the character with the highest skill automatically does it. GAME PLAY! I'd love to hear the lobby that declares games with minimal interactivity "not even games" weigh in on that horseshit. One of the game's principal modders BLASTED the developers post DC release for once AGAIN allowing rifle skills to retain utter primacy, rendering all other weapon skills virtually moot by comparison. Cover is also binary, you're either in it or you're not, and by mid game to-hit bonuses are so high on all your guys that an enemy being in cover or not being in cover is virtually irrelevant. I could go on and on. It's not a good GAME. You and I could sit here and in 15 minutes come up with a better stat/skill and game mechanics system on paper, and that's if one of us was blind drunk. Why is this acceptable from a company selling their game for $60 at launch? What if Bethesda did this? What if Bioware did this? We have Dr. McD yowling in this thread about armor values in Fallout, so we know EXACTLY how people would respond. They'd call foul. But no, I'm "overstating" the issue. Presumably because of "warm familiarity".
Same with a lot of the quest and story design, which is open to all sorts of nonsense that the new more cinematic entries into the genre are simply incapable of.
Oh, DO tell. Because I JUST got finished a run through of the (still broken, hilariously) Director's Cut, and I'd love to hear about all the wonders I experienced that modern games are "incapable of". Because it felt like a game I could and should have gotten off GOG for $5, only I wouldn't, because there's about 100 better offerings on there. Was it the part where I could choose between Highpool and Ag Center? As though Witcher 2 didn't have an entirely different second chapter that was some 20 hours long depending on player choice? Was it the fact that I could say yes or not to some quests, or that totally irrelevant NPCs could live or die depending on my actions? Good Christ, it's like magic! What technical wizardry!
It's a rewarding rpg experience in a novel and under-utilized setting with some fantastic cast of characters and great roleplaying opportunity.
What was "fantastic" about the characters, specifically? They seemed pretty dull to me, none particularly memorable. I guess I liked the Rat Shaman, what little personality she was able to exude through the utterly pedestrian writing. Why is an "under utilized" setting important here, given you said up above that innovating or being unique "isn't important"? Or is it selectively important? Why is it rewarding? What was rewarding about it, that isn't rewarding in other games?
Dragonfall provided a compelling noire-style murder-mystery whodunnit in compelling setting and with a cast of characters I actually gave a damn about.
Why was it compelling? Why do you "give a damn" about the characters here, yet presumably not elsewhere? I'll be honest, I played it completion and I couldn't even tell you the NAME of a single character from it. I remember a bald Dragon totem Shaman. And...that's all I got. Oh there was an angry girl too. I can't remember what her deal was. I can name check almost the entire cast of Planescape or Baldur's Gate 2 though. Now THOSE were compelling characters.
Hong Kong iterated on that by providing a new story in a similar vein with an even greater focus on characters and with an improved ability to give the player opportunity to play the character they wanted to play.
You mean, if I put a point into "Security" I could use a Security option during dialogue and get a unique line of (pedestrian) dialogue. Exciting stuff. I brought the Drone guy instead of the hacker, so instead of hacking the door open I'll send my drone through this conveniently placed duct to throw a switch! Game play! Modern games could never equal this!
The combat might be simplistic but I nevertheless find it enjoyable, and while the visuals aren't brilliant they're far from terrible either.
I'm glad you enjoy it, it's still utterly simplistic. That's not good. Also not good is the fact they threw out a pen and paper system of surpassing complexity in favor of a bare bones system and stripped down classes. Why is this commendable? Again, imagine if Bioware did this, or Bethesda, or (shudder) EA. Would we be cheering? No we would not.
And the visuals...don't make me do the PoE thing again. They're terrible. The engine is awful. It's static and 2D, the game spaces are tiny and almost entirely non-interactive, there's loading screens everywhere, the character graphics are comparable to Gold Box games from the mid 90's. This is not good. We can be objective about this. I LOVE Mount and Blade, but I can be objective and admit it's as homely as a gargoyle's tit. This is one of the ugliest, least functional engines in gaming.
That I can get all three Shadowrun games for the same cost as Inquisiton isn't a bad thing, it's a selling point!
Getting three bad games for the price of one bad game with higher production values isn't a selling point, it means you need to make better purchasing decisions. =P
Okay so...addendum.
I am not trying to be mean. I realize I am shitting on games you enjoyed a lot, and shitting on them pretty hard. It's not because I think they're the worst games ever made, it's because I think ALL of these developers were capable of doing a LOT BETTER, and they all took some pretty appalling shortcuts, and have been getting unreserved praise almost solely on the merits of "nostalgia gud". It pisses me off. Pillars of Eternity could have been a triumph of imagination. Wasteland 2 could have given us the "combat inspired by Jagged Alliance 2" that they promised. Shadowrun could have USED THE FUCKING GAME as a jumping off point instead of creating that super-streamlined nightmare. All of it could've been done on their tiny budgets. I don't expect Witcher 3 from these guys, I don't even expect a New Vegas or Alpha Protocol. But I expected more TRY. Don't just yank my nostalgia chain, and don't just ape the Infinity Engine...which was considered a
laughably terrible engine even in its heyday that was persistently holding otherwise amazing games back and call it a day. Do better work. That's what I want to see from these guys. Obsidian especially, they can and have done better. These other guys might just stink.
Before you go all anger fingers in response, DO remember you waded into this by saying I was "bitter and cynical". Them's fightin' words! I simply provided the fight I imagined you were looking for. There are no hard feelings and I'm glad you liked the games. =)